In memoriam of Professor Terry Gillespie

Abstract

Dr. Terry Gillespie, an emeritus professor at the University of Guelph, passed away suddenly on December 2, 2018, following a brief illness.Wewould like to honour his memory with a special editorial highlighting his contributions to research, mentorship, and teaching in agrometeorology and biometeorology. We are especially honoured to publish new work, coauthored with Terry, encompassing some of Terry’s last research efforts. At the time of his death, we had been actively working through ideas, data, and analysis with Terry on methods and measurements concerning radiation absorbed by humans affecting thermal comfort, which is published in this issue of the International Journal of Biometeorology (IJB) (Vanos et al. 2021). Terry and Bob liked to call the paper “People are Cylindrical... Elephants are Globular” because the study focused on providing solutions to errors from globe thermometers when applied to humans. Terry’s notes and calculations on cylinders, spheres, ellipses, colours, sizes, and solar exposure were exciting and fun to review and test out. This new paper importantly shares such knowledge and solutions to support more accurate measurements with low-cost sensors of mean radiation temperature (or absorbed radiation) by a human. The paper accomplished the most systematic testing of various devices, specifically the cylindrical radiation thermometer (CRT), invented by Bob and Terry in 1986 and shared via IJB (Brown and Gillespie 1986). Subsequent work on the CRT under Terry’s guidance was also published in IJB (Krys and Brown 1990; Kenny et al. 2008, 2009a, 2009b; Hardin and Vanos 2018). Terry is most well-known for his work on meteorological aspects of plant diseases and atmospheric chemistry, especially related to the interactions with plants and agriculture. Many of these publications are published in IJB (e.g. Schaafsma et al. 1993; Sentelhas et al. 2004, 2005, 2007). His work on micro-meteorological aspects of thermal comfort and landscape architecture began later in his career. In 1980, Bob was looking for a topic for his Master of Landscape Architecture thesis that related his interest in microclimate with landscape architecture. He tracked down Professor Gillespie, who was on sabbatical at the time, and arranged for a half-hour meeting. That meeting turned into a 2-h brainstorming session where they excitedly laid the foundation for more than 40 years of collaboration. Over the next few years, they developed the human energy budget model that Terry liked to call COMFA, and they invented the CRT, which Terry called littleman, a nod to the movie “Little Big Man”. This collaboration led to numerous contributions from both Bob’s and Terry’s students in the biometeorological and the landscape architectural communities, in addition to those listed above (Vanos et al. 2012; Briggs et al. 2017), and a very well-known and fundamental cross-disciplinary textbook on Microclimatic Landscape Design (Brown and Gillespie 1995). Terry, pictured in Fig. 1, is famous for his teaching, winning some of the most prestigious awards, including the 3M National Teaching Fellowship in Canada in 1988, the highest national honour for innovative teaching and leadership in pedagogy. It is not an exaggeration to say that students loved learning from Terry. He worked with students as partners in learning, consistently engaging with us with an insatiable sense of humility, curiosity, and respect for student’s questions, thoughts, ideas, and input. He had a unique ability for making the complexities of physics and math in meteorology fun and instills deep interest in the topics. We fondly remember the many props Terry would bring into class, such as the “bowl of jelly” Jetstream using a wavey kitchen bowl, or his colourful Styrofoam cutouts to show a 3-D frontal system for the students. Terry also brought the most interesting examples to class from being a weather forecaster at airports on Canada’s east and west coasts. He always arrived early and stayed late for class to meaningfully interact with students. For many of us learning from Terry in the 1980s, 1990s, and * Jennifer Vanos [email protected]